HIGHWAY CODE AND AGGRESSIVE VIOLATIONS IN UK DRIVERS

Stephen G Stradling, Transport Research Institute, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK

and

Michelle L Meadows, Department of Psychology, University of Staffordshire, UK

The 3 Aspects of Driving

Driving is a skill-based, rule-governed, expressive activity and there are three aspects involved in being socialised into becoming a member of the driving community:

1. In the technical mastery phase the beginning driver learns how to control, position and manoeuvre the vehicle and make smooth progress - starting; stopping; steering; clutch control, changing gear; reversing, mirror-signal-manoeuvre. Until a good level of mastery is achieved, the driver will be unsafe.

2. In the reading the road phase the driver must learn which cues to use to anticipate the actions of other road users, especially the unsignalled or unexpected actions of others when they depart from the formal rules or from common local practices, and how to handle ill-defined situations and unusual road conditions.

3. In the expressive phase the driver uses the manner in which they drive to give expression to personality, attitudinal and motivational characteristics. How you drive is related to, but distinguishable from, what you drive (that the kind of car you drive is a ‘wannabe’ factor has long been understood by manufacturers and advertisers). Style of driving typically varies with age, gender and experience, but some basic ‘scripts’ for driving (e.g. "I am a very skilful driver and can handle the beast at speed", "Other drivers should look out for me rather than me look out for them", "Other drivers are just ordinary people trying, like me, to cope with a difficult and frustrating task and they deserve my respect and consideration") may persist throughout a driving career. When manner of driving is informed by ‘bad attitude’ the driver is dangerous.

Lapses, Errors & Violations

Studies by the Manchester Driver Behaviour Research Group over the past decade have concentrated on this third phase - the manner in which the car is driven - seeing this as an expression of the psychological characteristics of the driver.

On the basis of a number of large scale, national surveys in England asking drivers how often they experience certain driving manoeuvres (Reason et al, 1990; Meadows, 1994; Parker et al, 1995a, b; Lawton et al, 1997a, b), we have been able to identify three basic types of driving behaviours:

· Lapses, Errors and Violations.

This basic tripartite typology has been replicated in studies of drivers in Australia (Blockley & Hartley, 1995), Sweden (Aberg & Rimmo, 1998), New Zealand (Sulmann & Meadows, 2000), China (Xie et al, 2000) and Greece (Kontogiannis et al, in submission). The survey questions we use on the Manchester Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ) to measure how often drivers experience each of these three types of driving behaviours are as follows.

Table 1 DBQ Lapse Items

Lapses. How often* do you:

· Try to pull away from the traffic lights in third gear?

· Switch on one thing when you meant to switch on another?

· Take the wrong lane approaching a roundabout or junction?

· Misread the signs and exit from a roundabout on the wrong road?

· Realise you have no clear recollection of the road along which you have just been travelling?

· Intending to drive to destination A, you 'wake up' to find yourself on the road to destination B, perhaps because the latter is your more usual destination?

· Forget where you left your car in the car park?

· Hit something when reversing that you had not previously seen?

*rated on a 6-point scale from ‘Never’ to ‘Nearly all the time’.

Lapses (Table 1) are potentially embarrassing and may be a source of inconvenience to the driver, but are not usually life-threatening. They are more commonly reported by female than by male drivers. Age is also statistically associated with Lapses, with older drivers tending to report more. This may be associated with increasing problems amongst the elderly population of dividing attention, especially the monitoring of the current state of highly automated cognitive processes (Aberg & Rimmo, 1998).

Table 2 DBQ Error Items

Errors. How often* do you:

· Fail to see a ‘Stop’ or ‘Give Way’ sign and narrowly avoid colliding with traffic having right of way?

· On turning nearside, fail to see a cyclist who has come up on your inside?

· Fail to notice that pedestrians are crossing when turning into a side street from a main road?

· Fail to check your rear-view mirror before pulling out or changing lanes?

· Queuing to turn nearside onto a main road, you pay such close attention to the mainstream of traffic that you nearly hit the vehicle in front?

· Brake too quickly on a slippery road, or steer the wrong way in a skid?

· Underestimate the speed of an oncoming vehicle when overtaking?

· Attempt to overtake someone you hadn’t noticed to be signalling an offside turn?

*rated on a 6-point scale from ‘Never’ to ‘Nearly all the time’.

Errors (Table 2) are an example of the failure of planned actions to achieve their intended consequence (Reason et al, 1990) and include both failures of observation and misjudgements. Errors, like Lapses, have a weak, but statistically significant association with length of pre-licence driving (Meadows, 1994) and, typically, no systematic relation to age or sex.

Table 3 DBQ Violation Items

Violations. How often* do you:

· Disregard the speed limits late at night or very early in the morning?

· Cross a junction knowing that the traffic lights have already turned against you?

· Drive especially close to the car in front as a signal to its driver to go faster or get out of the way?

· Get impatient with a slow driver and overtake on the inside?

· Get involved in unofficial ‘races’ with other drivers?

· Have an aversion to a particular class of road user, and indicate your hostility by whatever means you can?

· Angered by another driver’s behaviour, you give chase with the intention of giving them ‘a piece of your mind’?

· Drive even though you realise you may be over the legal blood-alcohol limit?

*rated on a 6-point scale from ‘Never’ to ‘Nearly all the time’.

Violations (Table 3) – the kinds of behaviours which typically figure in lay accounts of aggressive driving - are here defined as deliberate deviations from those practices believed necessary to maintain the safe operation of a potentially hazardous system (Reason et al, 1990), or deviations from normative, reference performance on the road (Rothengatter, 1997), and are to be distinguished from the North American usage where a driver’s traffic violations are simply a count of the number of times he or she has been apprehended for breaches of the road traffic regulations. While some of what we call Violations are directly in breach of, and others might, in their execution, involve breach of UK traffic regulation (Stradling et al, 1990), the focus here is on self-reports of generally recognised ‘unsafe acts’ rather than on transgression of a legal code.

Many road safety professionals cite “Speed and alcohol, especially in combination” as the most important immediate precursors of crashes. The Manchester analysis, dividing aberrant driving behaviours into three kinds, shows speeding to be the most frequent and drink-driving (these days, thankfully) to be the least frequent of a more general class of driving behaviours - Violations. Drivers who commit one type of Violation are more likely to commit other types.

Violations and Crash Involvement

Violations are consistently reported with higher frequency by male drivers, by younger drivers, and by high-mileage drivers. However, the crucial differentiator between Violations, Errors and Lapses is that Violations, not Errors or Lapses, go with crash-involvement. Typically in our studies it is those drivers who score high on Violations, not those who score high on Errors or Lapses, who are statistically more likely to have been accident-involved as drivers in the past (Parker et al, 1995b). and to be accident-involved (again) in the future (Parker et al, 1995c).

And this applies to both

· Active Accidents I hit another vehicle or an obstacle or lost control of the vehicle and left the carriageway, and

· Passive Accidents I was hit by another vehicle (West, 1995).

That is, high Violators are not only more likely to run into others or to run off the road, but to put themselves in situations where others run into them.

For example, reanalysing the data from one study (Meadows, 1994) using the SPSS CHAID package, we found that 12% of female low or medium Violators from a sample of 1000 drivers had one or more active crashes in the previous 3 years, compared to 18% of male low or medium Violators and 25% of high Violators (Figure 1).

Figure 1 One Or More Active Accidents In Previous Three Years

When driving carefully, male drivers are more at risk than female drivers (18% vs. 12%: but UK males report a 50% higher average annual mileage). But female drivers who adopt a high violating manner of driving more than double (12% to 25%), and male drivers increase by almost a half (18% to 25%), their risk of active crash involvement.

For passive crashes in the previous 3 years the figures were 14% for low mileage drivers, 13% for high mileage drivers who were low Violators, but 24% for high mileage drivers who were medium or high Violators.

Figure 2 One Or More Passive Accidents In Previous Three Years:

High mileage drivers are more at risk of passive crashes - having others run into them - by virtue of their greater exposure (21% vs. 14%). But a low violating manner of driving is prophylactic, and low violating, high mileage drivers may protect themselves, reducing their risk to the same level as low mileage drivers (13%).

Thus bad attitudes make for bad drivers. And these findings call into question the conventional wisdom that road traffic accidents arise solely as a result of lack of skill on the part of drivers, and thus that the most effective way to reduce the number of accidents is to provide better training or remedial retraining in driver skills. Our findings are consistent with a general pattern of recent research findings from a number of countries (Waller, 1997) suggesting that:

· while some skill is essential in order to survive on the road, greater car handling skill does not necessarily result in safer driving, as some skilful drivers choose to drive in a risky manner.

Identifying a class of drivers who are more at risk on the roads - a greater risk both to themselves and to others - increases the scope for remedial action by targeting a particular segment of the driving population whose characteristics may be reasonably well specified. What do we know of the psychological characteristics of high-Violators?

When we divide drivers into three equal sized groups of High, Medium and Low Violators we find that:

· around 40% of Male drivers are High Violators as opposed to 20% of Female drivers

· over 50% of male drivers aged 17-25 and approaching 40% of female drivers aged 17-25 are High Violators.

Thus male drivers and young drivers are over-represented in the High Violator group: and we believe that this is a large part of the reason why young males in particular are over-represented in the traffic accident statistics.

However we should bear in mind that :

· not all High Violators are young and male (around 10% of female drivers aged 35 years and over fall in the High Violator group);

· not all young male drivers are High Violators (around 20% are Low Violators)

so that persuasive materials aimed solely at young male drivers will miss some targets and may antagonise others who should be role models, not targets.

Table 4 Characteristics Of High Violating Drivers

High Violators tend to:

· be young rather than old, be male rather than female, and be high mileage rather than low mileage drivers (Reason et al, 1990; Stradling et al, 1999)

· consider themselves (even) better drivers than do others (Reason et al, 1990)

· report stronger intentions to speed across different road types (residential road, shopping street, country lane, dual carriageway, 3-lane motorway) (Lawton et al, 1997c)

· over-estimate the number of other drivers who speed, drive too close, etc. (Manstead et al, 1992)

· rate the potential adverse consequences of their actions (e.g. having an accident, being stopped by the police) as less likely, and as less bad (Parker et al, 1992a,b)

· believe that their significant others are less likely to disapprove (Parker et al, 1992a)

· think that other drivers will be less upset by their bad behaviour (Stradling et al, 1992)

· are more likely to experience immediate, positive affect (‘feel good’) while violating, and

· are less likely to anticipate feeling regret after violating behaviour (Parker et al, 1995a)

· think refraining from the behaviours would be more difficult and thus that they are less in control of their behaviour (Parker et al, 1995a)

· show greater outward irritability (anger directed towards others) (Lawton et al, 1997a)

Highway Code and Aggressive Violations

Finally convinced that it was Violations that was the crucial variable, we developed some further Violation items. A study (Lawton et al, 1997a: Study 1) using an extended version of the Violations scale of the Manchester Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ) distinguished two classes of violations - highway code violations such as speeding and running red lights, and more directly interpersonally aggressive violations such as sounding one’s horn or giving chase to another driver when angered. Further studies (Lawton et al 1997a, Study 2; Parker et al, 1998) have confirmed this distinction between highway code and interpersonally hostile violations. A full set of the Highway Code Violation, Aggressive Violation and Error items of the current, modified DBQ are given in Table 5, arranged in descending order of frequency of reported commission within each set of items.

Table 5 Highway Code Violation (HCV), Aggressive Violation (AV) And Error (E) Items Of The Modified Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ)

Disregard the speed limit on a motorway	HCV
Disregard the speed limit on a residential road	HCV
Race away from the traffic lights with the intention of beating the driver next to you	HCV
Drive especially close to the car in front as a signal to its driver to go faster or get out of the way	HCV
Cross a junction knowing that the traffic lights have already turned against you	HCV
Stay in a lane that you know will be closed ahead until the last minute before forcing your way into another lane	HCV
Become impatient with a slow driver in an outer lane and overtake on the inside	HCV
Drive even though you suspect you may be over the legal blood-alcohol limit	HCV
Become angered by a certain type of driver and indicate your hostility by whatever means you can	AV
Sound your horn to indicate your annoyance to another driver	AV
Pull out of a junction so far that the driver with right of way has to stop and let you out	AV
Become angered by another driver and give chase with the intention of giving him/her a piece of your mind	AV
Underestimate the speed of an oncoming vehicle when overtaking	E
Queuing to turn left onto a main road, you pay such close attention to the mainstream of traffic that you nearly hit the car in front	E
Fail to check your rear-view mirror before pulling out, changing lanes, etc.	E
Fail to notice that pedestrians are crossing when turning into a side street from a main road	E
Brake too quickly on a slippery road, or steer the wrong way in a skid	E
Miss ‘Stop’ or ‘Give Way’ signs and narrowly avoid colliding with other traffic	E
On turning left nearly hit a cyclist who has come up on your inside	E
Attempt to overtake someone you hadn’t noticed signalling an offside turn	E

*rated on a 6-point scale from ‘Never’ to ‘Nearly all the time’.

Highway Code and Aggressive Violations and Anger on the Road

How does level of commission of these two aspects of what in lay terms would be called ‘aggressive’ or ‘unsafe’ driving relate to getting angry on the road?

Deffenbacher et al (1994) developed a Driving Anger Scale (DAS) to metricate the anger induced by a range of traffic situations. The scale was developed on an extensive sample of American college students. When we ran an anglicised version of the scale (Lajunen et al, 1998) we found three factors underlying the anger of a sample of UK drivers: anger when progress is impeded as a result of slow or discourteous driving by others (PI, Table 6), anger at the reckless driving of others (RD), and anger at being the target of direct hostility from other drivers (DH).

Table 6 DAS Factor Structure And Item Means* For UK Drivers

	PI	RD	DH
Someone cuts in and takes the parking spot you have been waiting for	3.1
Someone speeds up as you try to pass them	2.6
Someone is driving too slowly in the outside lane, and holding up traffic	2.5
Someone pulls out right in front of you when there is no one behind you	2.5
A slow vehicle on a winding road will not pull over and let people pass	2.3
Someone is driving more slowly than is reasonable for the traffic flow	2.2
A cyclist is riding in the middle of the lane, slowing traffic	2.1
Someone in front of you does not move off straight away when the traffic lights turn green	1.7
A pedestrian walks slowly across the middle of the street, slowing you down	1.7
Someone is driving very close to your rear bumper		3.1
Someone cuts in right in front of you on the motorway		2.9
Someone backs out right in front of you without looking		2.7
At night someone is driving right behind you with bright lights on		2.7
Someone coming towards you does not dim their headlights at night		2.5
Someone runs a red light or ‘Stop’ sign		2.4
Someone is weaving in and out of the traffic		2.3
Someone is driving too fast for the road conditions		2.3
Someone is driving well above the speed limit		2.1
Someone makes an obscene gesture towards you about your driving			2.5
Someone shouts at you about your driving			2.2
Someone beeps their horn at you about your driving			2.1

*Items on 1 – 5 scale from 1 ‘Not at all’ to 5 ‘Very much’.

PI = Progress Impeded; RD = Reckless Driving by others; DH = Direct Hostility by others

Table 7 (extracted from Lajunen et al, 1998, Table 5) shows scores on all three factors correlating negatively with age, with younger drivers tending to show higher levels of all three types of anger on the roads. Mileage was related to only one factor, and then only weakly. And gender differences proved statistically insignificant: male and female drivers reporting on average similar levels of all three types of driver anger – anger at having their progress impeded; anger at the reckless driving of others, and anger on receiving direct hostility from others.

Table 7 Correlations Between DAS Factors And Driver Variables

	Progress Impeded	Reckless Driving	Direct Hostility
Age	-.33***	-.18**